Monday, October 07, 2019

Good points by "Pulsar" in this comment on our social VR infographic, which suggests that Sansar is in third place, in terms of peak concurrency on Steam:

[T]he "concurrency that averaged" gives a better idea of the platform than a rare peak inflated by a special event; like High Fidelity did, reaching over 300 during events, when usually there was just a handful of people online outside those events. Sansar is doing the same.

And this was another of the biased and deceiving answers that Linden Lab staff gave in the previous AMA on Reddit, as well as when they answered the adult content in SL is "under 5%". While they make events in Sansar that reach those peaks, it remains true that normally there are only few people online.

I don't know if it's fair to say it's "deceiving" to report peak concurrency, as that's a reflection of how many people have installed the program and used it at least once -- it helps show us the total reach of the platform. But to Pulsar's point, average concurrency is also important to know. Here's why (as he explains):

With a 220 concurrency peak vs 300-500, you would think Sansar is just behind Rec Room now. In fact the average on Steam for Sansar remains about 20, while Rec Room is consistently over 200. Thus Rec Room is actually about 10 times more popular than Sansar on Steam. Even counting people not using Steam and looking directly in Sansar, Rec Room average concurrency is various times more than Sansar.

Rec Room peaks are consistent as their daily averages and the peaks come naturally (like in VRChat or Second Life).

In the past months, VRChat had consistent averages of about 6,000 and peaks ranging between 8,000 and 10,000.

In Sansar, instead, people are attracted only momentarily by an occasional (and short lasting) special event. I mean, they used Hello Kitty/Sanrio this time! It's a brand with millions and millions of fans worldwide, we aren't talking [about] Jane Doe. It's another big name that Linden Labs tries to partner with or to do something with, to promote their platform.

220 people for Hello Kitty during TwitchCon 2019 on September 27... And after the event, tumbleweeds as usual.

Right now there are about 10 people online in Sansar and today's peak [October 1] on Steam was 20.

This is all true, though at the very least, at least Linden Lab knows they should probably put on more fricking Hello Kitty events in Sansar. In any case, we probably need another infographic with average concurrencies!

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

The Lab should have made a Second Life 2.0. It would have been better received. Sansar can look beautiful with it's PBR materials but there isn't much next generation about it. Even after their recent redesign, the avatars are still way better in SL.

"Second Life 2" is what Sansar is. It's just that LL didn't understand what is most important to SL players (in-game avatar kitbashing & live collaborative world creation). Because they didn't know this is what people find most important in Second Life, they omitted it in Sansar.

I think that most people are missing the bigger picture. These Sansar experiments have laid waste to Newton's third law of action vs reaction. We now know it is possible to funnel vast amounts of resource and energy through Linden Lab development and dispirit it into a completely inert substance with no mentionable consequence.

The "Sansar Effect" may end up being one of the most important discoveries in combating our problems with nuclear waste. Who would have ever thought that you just needed to bore it to death?

is a little bit nuts to be arguing that a game with 200 users is more successful than a game with 20. Nuts in the wider context

is a bit like a political candidate getting 200 votes in an election, telling another candidate who got 20 that they are 10 times less/more successful. When to win the election the candidate who did win had to and did get 60,000